This Week In The Laboratories Of Democracy

Welcome back to our weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where there's no success like failure and failure's no success at all.

Let us begin in Iowa, where the echoes of the epochal Bachmann For President campaign continue to echo across the cornfields and around the grain silos. The triumph of the campaign in winning the moving-old-white-people-from-one-spot-to-another Iowa Straw Poll turns out to have been a bigger triumph of the grift than anything you could have found on the midway at the annual state fair.

His resignation came after attorney Mark Weinhardt said in a report released earlier in the day that it was "manifestly clear" Sorenson negotiated payments in 2011 that eventually reached $7,500 monthly in exchange for his work as Bachmann's Iowa campaign chair. The money flowed from Bachmann's political action committee, MichelePAC, and her presidential campaign to a Colorado consulting firm, which in turn paid Sorenson's Iowa-based firm, Weinhardt wrote in the report filed with the Iowa Senate. Sorenson's compensation from MichelePAC is a violation of a Senate rule that bars senators from being paid by political action committees, Weinhardt wrote.

We will borrow a bit from Robert Bolt's Thomas More: it profiteth not a man to gain the entire world but lose his soul, but for Michele Fking Bachmann?

Let us move along to Pennsylvania, where the GOP rebranding has hit another snag on the issue of marriage equality.

The county has to find new ways to cut costs, Creighton said, not new ways to spend money. "The state has a ban on same-sex marriage, so why should the county be offering benefits for same-sex marriage?" Creighton said Wednesday. "I don't feel the county should be looking for new ways to give away taxpayer money. Next it could be giving money out to people's pets or whatever. No, it probably won't go that far."

Probably not. They'd just eat it anyway.

Anyway, while Pennsylvanians work out whether pampered Yorkies should be taxed at a higher rate than, say, German Shepherds working as service animals or bomb-sniffers, let us move along to Oklahoma, where Special Blog Alkali Specialist Friedman of the Plains reports that the War On Christmas has eruptedearly this year.

This year, Josh McFarland, one of the chief organizers of the Tulsa Hills event, joined the board of directors of the downtown parade in an effort to combine the parades. "We have often wondered about how awesome an event we could put on if we could combine our sponsors, volunteers, participants and spectators," McFarland said. He said he agreed to combine efforts when the downtown group met his only demand, that the word Christmas be put back into the title of the downtown parade. As he understands it, he said, the parade will be called the Tulsa Downtown Parade of Lights, with a subtitle: a celebration of Christmas, Hanukkah and other holidays. "I don't care, as long as the word Christmas is in the title," he said. But everyone in the Tulsa Hills group was not on board, and Tulsa will still have two parades. Organizer Mark Croucher said he and Eddie Huff are again putting together the Tulsa Christmas Parade at Tulsa Hills. "I'm glad that they put Christmas back in the title, but it's still not a Christmas parade. "I'm doing this because what people want is a Christmas parade, not a holiday parade, not a parade of lights," he said.

People should not want to be on TV with Bill O'Reilly this much. It's not healthy.

Elsewhere, in Enid, Oklahoma, which is an actual city and not the aunt in your family that nobody talks about since she ran off with that sailor during The War, people danced a happy dance because the city will get to continue to discriminate some more.

The Enid City Council rejected the measure Tuesday night. The Enid News & Eagle reports many attending the meeting broke out in a half-minute of applause after the vote.

According to the play's director and theater faculty member Rory Ledbetter, some audience members used derogatory slurs like "fag" and heckled both cast members and the characters they were portraying for their body types and sexual orientations. Ledbetter said the audience's reactions included "borderline hate speech." "I am the only gay person on the cast," junior theater major Garrison Gibbons said. "I played a gay character in the show, and to be ridiculed like that was something that really made me realize that some people at Ole Miss and in Mississippi still can't accept me for who I am."

I can't tell you how pissed I am at these clowns for [link href='http://www.al.com/auburnfootball/index.ssf/2013/09/ole_miss_expecting_fireworks_w.html' target='_blank' link_updater_label='external']making me an Auburn fan

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